Words Alicia Baker never expected to say: My oven exploded.
She said that’s what if felt like earlier this year.
“My initial response was, ‘What did I do wrong?’” Baker told me.
Baker said she has replayed that day over and over again.
“After living here for 4 years, I decided that I was going to try the self-cleaning mode on an oven, which I’d never done,” Baker said. “I put it on, came upstairs to do some work and the next thing I know, I can hear my husband downstairs go, ‘The oven exploded.’”
While Bakers oven didn’t necessarily explode but the glass on the inside of her Whirlpool oven did shatter to pieces.
She’s not alone.
While the Consumer Product Safety Commission has not responded to multiple requests from us for an exact number of cases of ovens exploding, we found at least 11 reports that have been filed with the agency that date all the way back to 2011.
However, CPSC has not issued any warnings or recalls.
UNF associate professor of physics Jason Haraldsen has a theory on what’s happening.
“Temperature alone is not necessarily the issue, but that brings up the question of, well, why?” he asked.
Haraldsen said it’s likely Baker’s oven had a microfracture so small the eye couldn’t see it, but when combined with high temperatures like the ones reached on self-cleaning mode, your oven will shatter.
I reached out to Whirlpool and asked how common of an issue are these exploding ovens.
In a statement to News4Jax, the company replied: “Glass breakage like what this consumer experienced is exceedingly rare.”
They recommend the following type to prevent the glass on oven doors from shattering
- Do not close the oven door if the racks are not fully inserted
- Do not set objects on the glass surface of the oven door.
- Do not hit glass surfaces with bakeware or other objects.
- Do not wipe down glass surfaces until the oven has completely cooled.
Baker said that after this happened, she didn’t contact the company and instead cut her losses and got a new oven.
Baker said she will never use the self-cleaning mode again, just in case.
Multiple people who saw the promotions for this story contacted me to say this also happened to them. If you want to share your story, email me.